Vegan Pesto

There’s something really satisfying about growing and harvesting your own fruit and veg. In Fiji we used to have an abundance of food effortlessly growing in our garden. I loved picking passion fruit from outside our kitchen door to put in our daily smoothies and nothing tasted better than coconut milk freshly extracted from the coconuts surrounding our home. We had banana trees outside our bedroom window and curry leaves, eggplants and chillis rapidly growing all around with little to no effort on our behalf.

As a family we eat so much basil that I thought it’d be a good idea to try and grow our own here in Qatar. I bought seven basil plants at the farmer’s market a few weeks ago in the hope that at least one of them might survive. So I was completely delighted when all seven of them thrived!

Today I picked enough leaves to make a lovely batch of pesto. We all adore pesto and I usually make it with either pine nuts or cashew nuts. Sometimes I add a tablespoon of nutritional yeast to give it a cheesey flavor in place of parmesan, but I find it equally as delicious without and it doesn’t really need it.

We love adding it to spaghetti and courgetti (recipe here), combining it with vegan mayo (recipe here) to make pestonnaise, adding it to salad dressings, putting it on pizzas and baked potatoes and spreading it on tofu steaks.

This is our favourite, foolproof recipe that’s sure to delight any pesto lover-

Blend the following ingredients in a vitamix or food processor:

3 cups of basil leaves

2 cloves of garlic

½ cup of extra virgin olive oil

¾ cup of toasted pine nuts (I toast them by putting them in a dry frying pan over medium heat and constantly tossing until they are lightly browned)

1½ tsps of sea salt (I think this is the perfect amount of salt, but it may taste too salty for some people, so start with 1 tsp and add more from there if you want)

Enjoy!